Employees stiffed for pay at main beach restaurants

Employees stiffed

WASAGA BEACH – Employees say they are owed wages after working at The Dard, Copa Cabana and Bananas in the summer.

Summer staffers at the Beach Drive restaurant-bars in Wasaga Beach say they were issued NSF cheques and not paid at all. They are now fighting to get the money they are owed.

Jane Gray said she has been begging and pleading with management since August, trying to get the money her teenage son is owed.

Gray Klein, 17, worked at Copa Cabana as a prep chef from July until Labour Day.

He was owed $902.26 at the end of the summer and after his mother pestered his bosses, he was paid half. He is still owed about $450.

Klein was working at another Wasaga Beach business at the beginning of the summer but left to go work at Copa Cabana when he was promised $10.25 per hour, but when he did get his first cheque he realized he was being paid $9.60, student minimum wage.

Klein said he had to hound his employer for pay cheques from the beginning and he wasn't alone as at least eight of his fellow employees had similar problems.

"He worked a ton of hours for these guys. We had to chase them for the first pay cheque, the next couple were deposited and his last one bounced and I have been in touch with the manager and the owner and I am just getting the runaround," said Gray.

Gray said she has spent many hours trying to collect on her son's pay. She has complained to the Ontario Labour Relations Board, the Ontario Ministry of Labour and the Town of Wasaga Beach.

"Somebody has to stand up for these kids," she said. "I think it's a crying shame that teenagers are being taken advantage of when jobs are so hard to find in town."

Business licenses for The Dard, Bananas and Copa Cabana were issued to Marc Grossi. Phone calls to Grossi were not returned.

An employee at The Dard and Bananas said he too was not paid properly and is still owed money.

The employee, who requested his identity not be revealed, said he is owed close to $800.

He said everyone's final pay cheque bounced.

"At the end of the summer a lot of people quit so we were really short staffed and a lot of people worked double shifts and that's why our pay cheques would have been so high - because we had no staff and we were worked all the time and then they didn't pay us," he said.

He is giving the owners until Dec. 1 to pay up, before going to the labour board.

"I know there's people owed $1,000 and $1,200, pretty much everybody is owed money," he said.

His calls and text messages to Grossi, he said, have not been returned.

"I know everyone is getting fed up now and everyone has been contacting them and they keep saying, 'give me a week'," he said.

"After the May 24 weekend, they had claimed that we had given away free booze and were drinking on the job and that they lost $14,000 on that weekend. So they issued everybody a $0 cheque and signed it and that set the tone for the summer."

He said staff members that had worked there for years quit and some went to the labour board. Cheques for the proper amount were issued days later.

During the summer he said the shared tips, collected by the wait staff and divvied by management, were not properly distributed amongst the staff. Klein said the tips at Copa Cabana were also mismanaged.

Klein has other concerns about working at the Copa Cabana, including not being paid for 40 hours of training, a lack of safety training and not having regularly scheduled breaks, among other things.